The purpose of this post is to be a reflection of my impressions of the first day attending the 9th Responsible Business Summit hosted by Ethical Corporation here in London yesterday. The participants list promised some interesting discussions and I was looking forward to connecting with Twitter friends such as Mallen Baker, Scheubel Develop, Lumina CR, James Farrar as well as many other friends and former colleagues.
What are my main impressions from this first day?
The overall impression I got from the corporate and consultancy participants was that business is difficult at the moment and everyone is feeling this negative effect in their area. Businesses and individuals. I doesn’t matter whether you are in the the steel industry or telecoms business. The recession has hit business hard and CSR activities, budgets and headcount took a hit too.
This just reinforced my feeling that CSR and Sustainability is at a cross-roads at the moment. There are these companies that are still very successful and are going from strength to strength. This is usually the first line when you talk to people from the corporate CSR world. But once you start getting into the more detailed conversations I found that there are equally as many companies that have to make very tough decisions with regards to what CSR / Sustainability activities. The theme is scaling down and business process optimizing. As a consequences many practitioners pointed out to me that these are decisions that will inevitably effect the innovation capabilities within the CSR / Sustainability field and its best practice.
And this this seems to be an important aspect. The overall popularity of CSR and Sustainability is rising when you look at the big picture but at the same time best practice innovation is stalling. This is what I could tell from my conversations and discussions throughout the day. I have not come across the innovative initiative or strategy that really wowed me so far. It seems to be business as usual as far as I can tell. CSR and Sustainability know what they need to do but so far I am missing the strong will and attitude to achieve change within the industry. Everyone is doing business as usual but not more unfortunately.
In later conversations during the day I exactly pointed this out to Mallen Baker and James Farrar just to name two people also present on Twitter. They agreed to a certain degree to my assessment but also pointed out that this might be the perception and feeling of people who have been working in the CSR Sustainability field for quite a while now. Which I have obviously. We (the CSR / Sustainability professionals) might be to saturated with best practice to not appreciate the innovation currently happening in the field. I had to admit that this made sense to me.
What is your opinion on this? Are the people that have worked in this field for several years not able to see the really valuable new best practice out there? Any feedback would be very useful as always.
Let’s see whether the second day will provide me with a different impression. So stay tuned for more from me this week.